Week One of Ontario’s election is a case study in how politicians can come out of the gate waging war on the wrong issues, rather than showing the right stuff.

Tory Leader Tim Hudak has either tapped into a deep vein of voter resentment against recent immigrants, or taken a detour — possibly a U-turn — that has thrown his campaign off course after two years of meticulous preparations.

I can’t recall ever seeing the normally mild-mannered Hudak more impassioned than when he railed against “foreign workers” in stump speeches across Eastern Ontario. Speaking to relatively sparse crowds of predominantly white, rural, older Progressive Conservative supporters, he claimed they were being disadvantaged by a nefarious Liberal affirmative action scheme to help outsiders.

No politician is pure, so let’s set aside for the moment Hudak’s crass calculus that he can profit from a cultural wedge issue — as others have in the past. A bigger question is why he would spend so much time pummeling a Liberal proposal of so little interest, thus crowding out his own pocketbook agenda of cutting taxes and scaling back the HST.

The last wedge issue to dominate an Ontario campaign — the Tories’ ill-fated proposal to fund faith-based schools in 2007 — at least focused on an issue of potential relevance: the future of public education. Rightly or wrongly, people felt a cornerstone of the province’s school system was in play.

The current controversy, by contrast, is much ado about a minuscule proposal: a mere $12 million to subsidize some 1,200 highly-skilled Canadian citizens who arrived within the last five years with $10,000 tax credits for on-the-job training. The goal is to help these newly-minted citizens cope with the gaping hole in their resume that often shuts them out of the job market: a lack of Canadian work experience.

It represents an infinitesimal fraction of Ontario’s $124 billion budget and has no bearing on the province’s future — unless Ontarians use it to determine who leads them forward.

Yet after reaching out to cultural communities for two years, and boasting that he’s translated his platform into 15 foreign languages, Hudak has changed his tune. He still extolls his own Slovak roots, but stresses that his grandfather arrived here without much English or money — and never took handouts.

Funny, but Tories had previously proposed similar handouts of their own. More seriously, the world has changed since the Hudak clan arrived decades ago. It is widely understood, at least in this town, that Canada needs skilled professionals, and that their potential contributions are lost if they are consigned to taxis.

Even if you think the program is misguided, it hardly makes sense to give it so much attention. For Ontarians who had never glimpsed Hudak until the campaign got underway, his attack lines will serve as a jarring introduction. After all, when Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty rather cynically exploited the faith-based schools issue in 2007, he could at least draw on a store of emotional capital he’d built up with voters as a seemingly earnest Premier Dad character.

Now, McGuinty is attacking Hudak for playing a dangerous game of divide and conquer. He counters that as premier he always appealed to people’s better natures.

With mixed success. The last time a sensitive “foreign” issue came up in Canada — the arrival of Tamil boat people — mayoral candidate Rob Ford complained that Toronto didn’t need more migrants. McGuinty stepped in to rebuke him, saying in his upbeat way: “I just don’t think it’s representative of Canadians.”

He was wrong about that. An Angus Reid poll later showed a remarkable 55 per cent of Ontarians would deport the passengers (even if legitimate refugees). McGuinty, it turned out, was the one out of touch with public sentiment, not Ford.

That’s the trouble with the “foreign” issue. It doesn’t always play out the way you want, or hope. Either side may get burned on the stump.

We’ll soon see who has their finger on the pulse of the province. And who is better at pressing buttons.

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